Curating Yourself Online

A few weeks ago, a friend
wrote to me with a problem. He said his daughter’s name–let’s call her Alice Haynes–was mistakenly appearing on the
Internet as a member of a bowling group on the social-networking site Meetup.
Because I’m on Meetup’s board, he asked me to get her name removed. I checked
on it; as far as I could tell, the Alice
Haynes in question was not his daughter, but some other Alice
Haynes in another city.

The episode was a small
example of how issues of online identity and privacy are changing. In the old
days, the issue was keeping your data secret. Now, the challenge is making sure
your data isn’t mixed up with someone else’s, and controlling it as it spreads
out over the Web. This means managing and curating it.

Your presence on the
Web is increasingly distributed. And your data is not yours alone; it also
belongs to the merchant who sold you that red sweater (size 12), to Juan who
took the photo of you on the beach, and to Susan who said things about you.
Should I have the right to control what another person says about me? If I am a
Yankees fan, and you have given some vendor permission to track you and
advertise Red Sox gear to you, should I have no control over the fact that you
may see Red Sox ads when you visit my Facebook page? If some other person with
my name does something embarrassing, how can I keep my identity separate? (For
example, do you want everyone to have some kind of unique ID, or does that idea
terrify you?)

All these
questions reflect a new dimension of privacy: users’ ability to control their
self-presentation. The difficulty of doing this intensifies as advertisers and
website owners try to make money from user-generated content.

Joint rights–in this
case, those of the individual and the platform owner to information or to
presentation–invariably lead to tensions, trade-offs, and conflict. General
principles of how to accommodate both owners are useful, but individuals have
differing interests and sensitivities. Satisfying them requires contracts,
ideally in the form of easily checked-off permissions and restrictions.

Over time, vendors and
users together will develop tools and practices to deal with these questions.
But current website “privacy” policies don’t suffice. They’re full of
abstractions, euphemisms, and generalities, such as, “We may, at any point in
time, provide certain Specified Information to selected Marketing Partners … .”
Why not list for the user the same specific information that’s being sold to
those “marketing partners”–user name, address, credit history, purchasing
behavior, and so on? And then list, say, the top 10 marketing partners, and
offer the full searchable list on request? Or allow the user to decide which
advertisers may “sponsor” her presence on that site? All
these options would allow users to make informed choices.

Esther Dyson is an Investor in and board member of
23andme, Boxbe, meetup, wpp group, and yandex, among other companies.